Don’t Confuse Home Energy ‘Management’ with ‘Monitoring’

When both Google and Microsoft dropped their home energy initiatives earlier this month, many pundits proclaimed the death of home energy management (HEM).

For example, in an article that has one of the best titles I’ve ever seen – Home Energy Management: Premature Jocularity – Richard Stuebi of CleantechBlog writes:

At best, HEM is an idea before its time, dependent upon smart meters and other so-called “smart grid” technologies to enable a lot of the highest-value functionality of HEM. At worst, HEM is an idea whose time will never come — simply because most households simply don’t care that much about energy — and won’t spend a lot of time to save a few bucks on their energy bills, preferring to spend that incremental hour playing a video game or surfing social media.

But pundits like Stuebi have it wrong. HEM as we know it has been alive for two decades and thriving for the past few years. It represents the management of a home’s thermostats and lighting (and more) for comfort and savings.

What the death of Google PowerMeter and Microsoft Hohm may portend is the end of energy monitoring.

As I suggested upon the demise of those initiatives, most people really don’t want to check in with their energy dashboards to see how this week’s usage compares to last week’s, and how well they fare compared to their neighbors. That’s about all that Hohm and PowerMeter gave us.

Eventually, we’ll be able to tap into utilities’ real-time rates, and have our energy-sucking appliances respond accordingly -- automatically, without us having to open a Web browser, check the rates, and then manually set back the thermostat.

Even then, the value of energy monitoring may be nominal at best. Why not just spend $1,000 today to automate thermostats and lights, tying them to your security system and time of day (set back during AWAY or GOODNIGHT).

It’s relatively simple and painless compared to all this monitoring stuff.